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Anssi Halmesvirta
1he Old Foe Again: Ihe Pictorial Image of the
Ruskie (ryssä) in the Finnish Sports Journal
during the Winter War (1939-1940)
Introduction
The Finnish ‘hatred of Ruskies’, in Finnish ryssäviha, is a traditional designation for
a strong xenophobia towards everything Russian, which included deep suspicion
and fear of Russian activities and aggression. During the Winter War (1939-1940)
when the Soviet Red Army attacked Finland, it manifested as a desire to stop Rus¬
sian onslaught, and ultimately, eliminate its presence as the ‘old Eastern foe’ (in
Finnish: idan vanha vainooja) in order to secure the integrity and security of the
Finnish nation in the future. In general, it could also surface in hostile attitudes
towards the Russian form of government, irrespective of its nature, whether tsarist
or Communist, and towards Russians as people (Vihavainen 2013).
Concerning the origins of the hatred and fear of Russians, there are two preva¬
lent interpretations in vogue. The first one has it that the Finns and the Russians
had been archenemies throughout history or at least since the Great Wrath (1712¬
1721), when during the Great Northern War the Russians occupied and ravaged
Finland. Since then Finnish folklore and local history have carried with them the
figure of the “violent, barbaric Russian” who had raped “virgin Finland” (Vilkuna
2005: 493-494, 531-533). This interpretation speaks against the earlier view, ac¬
cording to which there was no longer any particular enmity between Russian rule
and the Finns in the long nineteenth century when Finland was an autonomous
Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire (1809-1917). For example, tsar Alexander II
was greatly respected in Finland for his reform and language policies—his statue
still dominates Senate Square in Helsinki. In his influential essays Vihan veljista
valtiososialismiin (‘From Brothers of Hatred to State Socialism’) Matti Klinge ex¬
plains that the ‘hatred of Ruskies’ was a later phenomenon, disseminated during
the Finnish Civil War (1918), when the juxtaposition between Finns and Rus¬
sians was politicised and exacerbated by the extensive White Finn propaganda war
against bolshevism (Klinge 1983: 57-112). Both interpretations hold because they
deal with ideas in different classes of Finnish society, the former with the long¬
term peasant attitudes and collective memory, the latter with the ideology of the
right-wing intellectuals of the 1920s—1930s. There was a tint of racialism in the
attitudes of the intelligentsia too, as the Finns were occasionally warned against
“blood-brotherhood”, Russian “racial” contamination, which had augmented the
“Red rebellion” and would lead to perilous assimilation of the Finns to the Rus¬